Word.ws English Dictionary

tell the truth

tell the truth verb: used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tell, truth.

Verb

tell the truth (third-person singular simple present tells the truth, present participle telling the truth, simple past and past participle told the truth)

  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tell, truth.
    • That year a U.S. appeals court found the program Snowden had exposed was unlawful and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.2022 September 26, “Putin grants Russian citizenship to U.S. whistleblower Snowden”, in Mark Trevelyan, editor, Reuters, archived from the original on 26 Sep 2022, Europe

Phrase

tell the truth

  1. (idiomatic, informal) Used to positively assert the frank honesty of an associated statement of set of statements; equivalent to "to tell the truth".
    • Then it sneezed. Considering what it was smelling, that was no surprise. Tell the truth, I'd gotten so used to the jof jof dung that I didn't notice it anymore.1991, Mike Sirota, Bicycling Through Space and Time

tell the truth meaning in Bengali and Arabic

tell the truth in Bengali

to tell the truth
বলিতে কি bolite ki

tell the truth in Arabic

to tell the truth
صَدَقَ ṣadaqa

Synonyms of tell the truth

Forms of tell the truth

third-person singular presenttells the truth
present participletelling the truth
past participletold the truth
pasttold the truth

Questions about tell the truth

What does tell the truth mean?
Tell the truth means used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tell, truth.
What is tell the truth in Bengali?
Tell the truth in Bengali is বলিতে কি (bolite ki). See Tell the truth meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is tell the truth?
Tell the truth can be a verb or a phrase.
What is the past tense of tell the truth?
The past tense of tell the truth is told the truth.

Words near tell the truth in the dictionary

  1. tell tale
  2. tell tales
  3. tell tales out of school
  4. tell the difference
  5. tell the time
  6. tell the truth
  7. tell the truth and shame the devil
  8. tell time
  9. tell us another
  10. tell us another one
  11. tell volumes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tell the truth (page history and authors); বলিতে কি (Bengali) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-tell the truth.ogg.

Cite this entry: “tell the truth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tell_the_truth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.